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How to get buy-in for your marketing budget

Cost-cutting in an economic downturn can make it much harder for your business to maintain its edge: it is precisely during lean times that you need your marketing budget the most, to persuade clients to come to you instead of your rivals.

So how do you persuade your finance decision makers that the marketing budget should remain at a healthy level? Here are some suggestions from Griffins, a leading Accountancy firm in Newbury:

1. Align marketing objectives to your firm’s business objectives. Be absolutely clear about how the marketing strategy will contribute to meeting these.

2. Get company-wide agreement about what the key performance indicators are for the year. These may be:

   • Sales
   • Profitability
   • Repeat sales (client retention)
   • Market awareness of organisation or products
   • Lead conversion (number of leads required to make a sale)
   • Cost of sale per product

3. Show in clear terms what the return on investment will be and what the cost of non-investment might be.

4. Ensure that someone follows up your marketing activity. There is no point in running a campaign to generate leads if there are no staff to follow them up in a timely and appropriate fashion. Similarly, there is no point in developing a mailing list unless you have a campaign planned.

5. Do not spend any part of your precious budget unless the expenditure can be justified in commercial terms and you can measure the return.

6. Ensure that there is tight internal control of the marketing budget and that spend can only be authorised by those who know what the ground rules for expenditure are. Hold them accountable for any unauthorised spend.

7. Keep accurate records of expenditure and actual marketing performance against agreed targets as this will help you justify your budget at the end of the year as well as help make a case for the following year’s budget.

Doing all this is no guarantee that you will get the budget you desire but you will have given a sound justification of why the marketing budget should be at the proposed level.

Marketing during a recession can help you ride out the storm and bring you to the forefront of your target customers’ attention, particularly if your competitors have cut their marketing spend.

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